The perils of supremacy

In a wide-ranging address delivered on Tuesday 13 March at the opening ceremony of the American University in Cairo's 13th International Model United Nations conference, renowned political analyst Mohamed Hassanein Heikal presented a simple, yet astounding, precept. According to Heikal, the only hope for the prevalence of the supremacy of law -- the fundamental principle on which the global body was founded -- is for an immediate and profound reconciliation to take place between the United States and the United Nations. Arguing quite provocatively that the US's last "major stand as a cooperative and integral member of the UN" was its opposition to the tripartite aggression on Suez in 1956, Heikal expertly weaves both the history of the organisation, and its uneasy relationship with the world's largest superpower. The full text of the speech, which was greeted with much enthusiasm by participants in the simulation who came from all over the world, as well as from Egyptian universities and AUC, is printed exclusively below
Permit me first to express my gratitude for your kind invitation to address this assembly. I would also like to take this opportunity to convey my esteem for the contribution this vibrant university has made to Arab education.
In particular, I admire this university's concern for this dynamic form of new age culture that has brought us together for the 13th session of the International Model United Nations -- a unique forum designed to promote awareness of the UN and its charter, along with a range of pressing world issues, through an engaging and thought-provoking process of simulation and debate.
I am, of course, aware that I am standing before a new generation of youth, into whose hands will pass the fate of their peoples and the fate of the world. There is a vast difference between the challenges and responsibilities that will fall upon this generation and those faced by any of its predecessors. This generation is destined to assume the mantle of responsibility not only at a time that coincides with the symbolic passage from one century or millennium to the next, but also with the composite realities that have taken mankind into another epoch. These symbols and realities combined have brought us into an extraordinary transition of unlimited scope, and it has brought this generation face-to-face with a revolution unparalleled in history.
Human society has experienced only a few major revolutions: from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture, from agriculture to industry, from steam to electricity, from electricity to information technology. The revolution we are now passing through differs radically from all its predecessors. Whereas all previous revolutions gave mankind decades and sometimes centuries to adapt, today's revolution expects us to make major adjustments in split seconds. This alone is a weighty consideration to bear in mind for those whose turn is to come to weigh the choices and respond.
I would now like to submit to you certain observations to that we can proceed in tandem in this discussion on the basis of a clear and common perspective.
***
Let us first agree that we come into this world not merely because nature wills it, but to conduct a dialogue with the world we live in. Our role in this dialogue is to render the world more conducive to our visions for the future. The world responds by presenting us with the legacy of history. It is this meeting between human aspiration and the wisdom of history that gives human evolution its driving force and creative impetus, opening the way to endless possibilities.
The most crucial question mankind posed to the world was its dream for freedom, justice and equality. The dawn of civilisation began when the world's wisdom pointed us towards the concept of law. Many believe that the invention of the plough, the wheel, the printing press, the automobile, the aeroplane, the missile, and the computer were the most important landmarks in course of human development. This is true to a large extent. But the fuller truth can only be perceived when we grant primacy to the progress of law -- in theory and practice -- as the guarantor of all human rights and the guardian of the cumulative legacy of human civilisation.
***
Let us also grant that the rise of the supremacy of law within the boundaries of a single society has steered mankind towards applying this concept to the society of nations. Now let us agree that the supremacy of law over the society of nations should be realised in a world in which international boundaries have become so intertwined as to have virtually disappeared. This gradual shrinking of the world, I should add, occurred, not by force of arms, but through the spread of knowledge.
It is possible to observe a certain parallel between the rise of the sovereignty of law at the national and global levels. In both we can trace its evolution from the vying dictates of the strong, to conflict, to various unstable modes of accommodation, until eventually a consensus was achieved over a formal codification of rights and duties. At the national level, this code ultimately extended the principle of freedom, justice and equality to all citizens. At the global level, it established, in theory at least, the right of all peoples to independence, security and development, and the right of all nations to participate in the government of the affairs of the world within a universally recognised framework.
But there is also a striking difference between the evolution of the supremacy of law at these two levels. In one the process occurred naturally and by force of necessity. Naturally as the people of a nation bound themselves together as single, sovereign entity, and by force of necessity when it became apparent that this sovereignty had to be sustained by guarantees. In the society of nations, however, we find independent peoples and nations, the existence of diverse recognised sovereignties, intense rivalries over spheres of influence and vicious competition over material interests. At this level, the need for the supremacy of law remains urgent.
***
History is replete with philosophers and saints who have entertained the dream of a universal government. But it was not until the community of nations embraced, with a measure of determination, the idea that law should be their supreme arbiter that this dream took its first flight. The League of Nations, founded in the wake of World War I, held the promise for an end to the horrors of the blood filled trenches.
This promise failed, and the world erupted into a new bout of warfare that concluded to the resounding explosion of the atomic bomb. With even a greater sense of urgency than before, the society of nations realised the need for a more enduring regulatory framework to "save future generations from the scourge of war." In 1945, delegations from around the world met in San Francisco to draft the charter that founded the United Nations Organisation and established a new concept of international legitimacy. Although some might find it difficult to consider this charter a law binding upon all its signatory parties, most are ready to accept it as a treaty that has the force of law.
Yet, the idea of a binding law could not have been far from the minds of authors of the UN charter. They created the General Assembly as a form of international parliament with legislative powers, and the Security Council as a multinational executive branch. Moreover, as they were drafting what we might call a constitution for international government, they felt the need for some means to enforce respect for its rules and principles. Given the many and often conflicting sovereign entities in the world, such a task was formidable. For how could they ensure respect for an autonomous sovereignty beyond their borders? However, the fathers of the UN charter spared no thought and effort in drafting provisions for the creation of an armed force that could uphold the rule of law across the national boundaries. The system they unanimously approved called upon all members of the General Assembly to designate units of their armed forces that would be kept at the ready to become part of a UN force, should it be determined that recourse to arms was necessary in order to uphold international legitimacy. This international force was placed under the command of the Security Council and a committee made up of the chiefs of staff of the five permanent members of the Security Council was charged with the levying, organisation and deployment of this force.
***
More than 50 years have passed since the UN charter was ratified and the system it established was put into operation. It would not be excessive to say that this system has proven itself sound, even if it has not always been able to assert itself effectively. That is to say, the system, due to its inherent wisdom, has been able to keep alive the hope that the rule of law will prevail among nations, even if, at times, it has appeared so feeble as to give rise to doubts about its validity.
Such scepticism must be avoided at all costs. To renounce our faith in the supremacy of law among nations, given the vast disparities between them in power and development, is to condemn the world to lawlessness, to a virulent Darwinism.
This danger is very real -- so real as to have inspired many conscientious and noble efforts to avert it. These efforts reflect a concerted and steadfast commitment to promoting the need to abide by the principle of the international supremacy of law. One major contribution is this International Model UN, in which you are taking part. I find this programme very encouraging. There is no greater sustenance for the validity of an idea than when youth are moved to embrace it, for then the idea has a future. Indeed, it may hold the very key to the future.
***
Among the inherent qualities of youth is its unrestrained capacity to engage in a process that is extremely vital to human evolution. This is the process of "query and revision." In fact, the failure to invoke this faculty from one generation to the next would bring mankind's progress to a standstill.
Query and revision is the only bulwark against the automatic mimicking of former generations and the degeneration of ideals into hollow rites and rituals. History has demonstrated that the "mummification" of ideals does not prolong their life, however it might preserve a glimmer of their memory.
I believe that all of you here in this conference stand before a very crucial moment. This moment has brought you, a new generation of youth, face to face with the formidable demands of an entirely new age, one that will summon your profoundest and most exacting powers of querying and revision.
It is no small honour to have been given the opportunity to address this assembly of today's youth, and I trust that you will permit me to contribute something of direct bearing to your activities in this conference. I have read the list of topics that are to be the focus of your various committees, and I find them all compelling and potentially productive.
However, you, the participants in this conference on the Model UN, are now being called upon to engage in that dialogue with your world, to tell it what you think and to listen to what it has to say, to change the world and change with it, to enter into that dialectic between human aspiration and the wisdom of history. Yours is the generation whose turn has come to prevent the stagnation of ideals into rituals cloaked with an outward reverence but devoid of vigour.
***
Therefore, with your generation before me and with the exigencies of a new age in mind, I would like to raise a very crucial issue. I would like to suggest to you that all those who subscribe to the international supremacy of law and defend the charter of the UN have a duty before them that precedes all others.
This duty is to seek a reconciliation between the US, the dominant power of today's world, and the UN, the living embodiment of the rule of law above all nations.
My career has coincided with that historical conjunction between the rise of the US as the dominant power in the world and the emergence of the UN as the contractually agreed upon instrument for upholding the international rule of law.
I had my first opportunity to gain first hand acquaintance with the UN system in 1948. In August and September that year I covered a special Security Council session that was held in Palais de Chaillot in Paris to deliberate the crisis of the war in Palestine.
The UN, at the time, was still a roving organisation, with only temporary headquarters in Lake Success near New York, while awaiting the completion of its permanent headquarters on the banks of the East River. Soon, however, it settled into its new premises and I was able to tour them during my first visit to the US in September 1951.
From then until now, half a century later, my career has kept me abreast with the international issues and crises that were brought to that forum. Indeed, I covered many of them myself, particularly those pertaining to this region, from the Suez War of 1956, through the 1967 and 1973 wars, up to the present. Moreover, I have had the good fortune to have met and conversed with every secretary-general of the UN, from Trygve Lie to Kofi Annan.
Over these years, I have reached the conviction, confirmed by events and made more compelling by the transformations wrought by changing times and eras, that unless the US reconciles itself with the UN the future of the international supremacy of laws is in peril.
***
The relationship between the US and the UN has passed through several phases.
* When the UN charter was first being drafted, the US feared that certain parties were seeking to contest the basis on which the UN was to be founded. The forces of Nazism and fascism had just been defeated in a war in which American resources and command played a prime role. The helm of the new world order -- the Security Council -- was placed in the hands of the five nations that had led the allied victory in the war. The US, however, had certain reservations over some of the candidates. In addition there were pressures to place the US on par with other permanent and, perhaps, non-permanent Security Council members. The US resented this reluctance to recognise it at least as the first among equals. Indeed, this was one of the factors that gave rise to the Cold War.
* In the 1950s, a decade after the creation of the UN, global upheaval came from the direction of Africa and Asia, where the tide of national liberation movements gained momentum beneath the banner of Non-Alignment. The US perceived Non-Alignment as an alignment against the US. The Soviet Union, for its part, enthusiastically endorsed the anti-colonial liberation movement and grasped the chance to lend emerging nations political, military and economic support to bring them closer to its orbit and to deepen the gulf between them and the US. In this decade, 1956 marks a significant turning point in the history of US-UN relations. The US's opposition to the tripartite aggression against Suez that year was its last major stand as a cooperative and integral member of the UN.
* As growing numbers of newly independent nations -- prime among them the People's Republic of China -- became part of the UN order in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the US began to feel that "others" had taken control of the organisation. Its response was to draw apart, to let them discover that without the US the UN would be nothing but words without action, resolutions without fire. For words without action, however solidly they are backed by law, are powerless, and resolutions that cannot be enforced, however just their intent, are futile.
But, not only did the US draw apart, it took with it the major international causes, such as disarmament, nuclear weapons, and space exploration. These issues, it held, were too important to give a say on them to countries that were not familiar enough with their intricacies to make the necessary crucial decisions. It also took with it the handling of international crises, such as the war in Vietnam, the Middle East conflict, and the contest between the superpowers at the time. Here it argued that such thorny questions could not be resolved by majority vote, not with the ever-present risk at hand that cold war could escalate to nuclear war.
* The 1970s and 1980s brought a precarious fluidity to the Cold War. The Soviet Union was beginning to show the symptoms of crisis and the Third World had begun to beat a retreat. Over this period, the US appropriated all the major causes of war and peace. In so doing, it not only sought to bypass the UN but, often, to exclude the international body entirely. The arena the US had decided to keep for itself, above all, was the Middle East. Thus, from the first contact between Egypt and Israel in 1974 to the Oslo accord between the Palestinians and Israelis in 1993, the US, alone, steered negotiations and engineered settlements, all outside the procedural framework of the UN, and in defiance of its charter as well.
* In the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to hopes that the US would take the initiative to reconcile itself with the UN. The Cold War had ended and the confident, fiery spirit of national liberation had deflated considerably. However, it turned out that the US did not want to return to the UN. It wanted the UN to come to it.
In August 1990 the world was stunned by Iraq's bid to annex Kuwait. Many in the Arab world and abroad felt that Iraq had crossed the red line. It was then that the US took a first step towards the UN, after which there emerged a spate of resolutions, the most significant being Resolution 678, sanctioning a new procedure for armed intervention to enforce an international resolution. What is crucial here is that the intervention that took place was not international. It may have been undertaken in the name of the UN, but the power to carry it out was conferred upon a group of nations said to be "cooperating with the government of Kuwait." The result was the US-led international alliance that waved its mandate in the air and acted as it saw fit.
***
The decision to permit this form of intervention in the Gulf set the precedent of granting one party, or set of parties, a free licence to take law enforcement into their own hands. Nothing could more flagrantly violate the spirit of law. The law is that corpus of contractual provisions voluntarily and unanimously approved by all parties to a constituent entity. On the basis of these provisions, power to enforce the law is conferred upon a pre-designated agency, and implementation must follow pre-designated regulations and procedures. These provisions, moreover, are intended to ensure that all actions taken to enforce the law are subject to an autonomous body of rules and principles that derives its authority independently from any one party or sub-group of the constituent entity.
In the case of the UN, the law that received the voluntary and unanimous consent of its constituent members is embodied in the UN charter and its subsidiary principles and articles.
When the Gulf War began on 17 January 1991 under the banner of the "international alliance to free Kuwait," it was understood that the UN charter was serving this goal. After the war accomplished its aim, it became clear that there was another agenda. To achieve it the General Assembly had been frozen and the Security Council privatised.
Yet, the sovereignty of law inherently cannot be the preserve of any single party. The law does not brook monopolisation.
It is ironic that the country that has been able to impose the respect for the spirit and text of the law on all its citizens, from the highest official in the land down, and the country that has called the weak and oppressed from around the world to come to its shores to share in the dream of equal opportunity and the equality of all beneath the law -- it is ironic that this country should today be summoned to support the supremacy of law above all nations, including itself.
***
The starting point of any session of the UN General Assembly is the agenda. The normal procedure for setting the agenda begins before the session, when the UN General Secretariat takes the previous year's agenda, crosses off those items that have been dealt with or lapsed, and then adds new items imposed by recent events, put forward by the general committees, or requested by the accredited delegations.
Your agenda for this session of the Model UN features a diverse range of fundamental issues. Peace-Keeping, Expanding the Security Council, Human Rights, Crime Prevention, the World Trade Organisation, the International Court of Justice all reflect the prime concerns of today and merit our fullest attention and sincerest dedication.
Nevertheless, may I be so bold as to propose to this generation of youth, which holds the key to the future, that you include another item on your agenda? I am moved to do so for I strongly believe that this item should supersede all other concerns, because, quite simply, it informs each and every one of them and increases their chances of success.
This agenda item is called "The US and the UN."
Below it we read:
* How can we effect a reconciliation between the US and the UN in order to secure the supremacy of law above all nations?
* How can we convince the most powerful nation in the world today and the standard bearer of democracy to respect the sanctity of law and the legitimacy of democratic rule among the community of nations, as embodied in the UN?
* Finally: How do we make the US realise that its attempts to reach a settlement over Palestine, outside the framework of UN's authority and procedures, have not brought peace, and that its monopolisation of the Security Council in its dealings with Iraq has not brought security?
Sustaining international peace and security is the most pressing concern of our times. When the UN sought to undertake this task without the backing of the US, law lacked the might to reinforce it. When the US tried, outside of the scope of the UN, the might was there but the law was absent. Fostering international peace and security demands the coexistence of both: the supremacy of law and the power to enforce it.
photo: Mohamed Mos'ad
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor